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Pod Save the World
Ukraine's Surprise Attack on Russia
01:19:03
Ben and guest co-host Ali Velshi kick off the show with a conversation about how Trump’s policies are accelerating US brain drain, Tulsi Gabbard’s Fox News-style overhaul of the Presidential Daily Brief, and the eyebrow-raising new press secretary at the Pentagon. They also talk about Ukraine’s massive surprise drone strike on Russia and the stalemate between Putin and Zelensky. Additionally, they cover the horrific attack on Jewish demonstrators in Colorado, Israel and America’s disastrous aid distribution operation in Gaza, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and the future of the two-state solution. Also discussed: China’s advantages in the trade war, how trade wars can become real wars, and far-right politics in Poland, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Finally, Ali takes a step back to talk about being a journalist covering Trump 2.0. Ali’s show Velshi airs weekends on MSNBC, and his book is Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:54]
Ali Velshi
Hey, this is Cameron Abadi, co host of Foreign Policy's weekly economics podcast Ones and Twos. It's been 80 years, years since the Nazi surrender in Europe. And my co host Adam Tooze and I are marking the occasion with a three part miniseries on World War II. We'll discuss the colossal scale of the war as an economic event. I think this is a moment when really talking about quantity and skies and scale is important because it was just very, very big who the economic winners and losers were. So on the one hand labor wins, but it wins within a game which is no longer going to allow radical options. And how the war changed economies around the world. It's well known. I think the Californian economy is transformed by the aerospace revolution of World War II because the big expensive thing in World War II armaments is aircraft.
- [01:42]
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You can listen to Ones and Twos.
- [01:44]
Ben Rhodes
That's t o o z e wherever.
- [01:47]
Ali Velshi
You get your podcast.
- [02:04]
Ben Rhodes
Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Ben Rhodes.
- [02:06]
Ali Velshi
And I'm Ali Velshi.
- [02:07]
Ben Rhodes
So that's right. Ally is stepping in today. Tommy is out this week. But we're really pleased to have you back in the co host chair. Many of you know Ali from his show on MSNBC on the weekends. Everybody should watch it. You've been on Pod Save America, Podseve the world. You last came on to talk about your extraordinary book Small Acts of Courage which everybody should check out. It's a remarkable story of your family, but it touches many parts of the world and this question of democracy and its challenges that we'll be talking about a lot today. So thanks so much for joining me in the copilot seat here.
- [02:49]
Ali Velshi
It's a pleasure to be back. It's nice because I often interview you, but we have very small segments and there's always, I always leave this thinking there's so much more to say and there's so much more I want to get out of this. So I'm happy to be back with you.
- [03:01]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I know. Used to having like eight minute conversations. So. Well, today we have a lot to cover. We're going to talk about the latest from the Trump administration, including the kind of brain drain that they're trying to create here in the United States. We'll cover the latest from Ukraine, which quite dramatic developments actually over the last week. We'll check in with what's been going on in Gaza. We'll also take a step back and talk a bit about the trade war which is ongoing, including really the U.S. kind of, I think having a weaker hand with China than it might otherwise think. So we've got a lot to get to today. Now, let's start with the Trump administration, Ali, and I'm really glad you could come on to talk about this subject because I know it's something you've thought a lot about, which is what's happening with foreign students and kind of general brain drain from the United States. So last Wednesday, Marco Rubio made two announcements, one of which was revoking the visas of Chinese students, which drew a lot of attention. Rubio said the US Would revoke visas for students, quote, with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. So like a lot of things that Trump has announced, a little ambiguity there, especially considering that there are nearly 280,000 Chinese students who were at US schools last year. The number who actually pose a national security threat is minuscule. But obviously Trump will define that how he wants. The Chinese embassy condemned this as politically motivated and discriminatory. But actually, Ali, the Chinese government might not be that unhappy because they're going to get some of their smarter students and Ph.D. students in important fields back in China instead of here in the United States with their resources staying in China instead of coming to the United States. I should add that Rubio also announced that the US Would impose visa restrictions on, quote, foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Another ambiguous statement. Rubio singled out efforts to regulate American big tech. You know, they've targeted people that have been critical of the United States online. This echoes kind of a J.D. vance theory about censoring Americans and everything that's wrong with Big Tech, despite the fact that near as I can tell, a lot of big tech is capitulated to Trump. But I want to start with this question of Chinese students, Ali, and what do you think the impact will be? What is the cost that maybe Americans aren't counting on when it comes to, you know, making this a place that is inhospitable to Chinese students and to foreign students generally?
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Ali Velshi
Well, I want to go back in history for a couple of examples. One is recent history when Donald Trump imposed his so called Muslim ban. What a lot of people didn't register is that most of the people who America was getting from these countries that were banned tend not to be, you know, as we portray sort of these sort of desperate refugee. These are, these are visa students studying in most cases in research or studying at U.S. universities. And it had the effect of redirecting a lot of these students who weren't sure whether this policy would end and when it would end and when it would come back in to a place like Canada, for instance, which was most happy. The Muslim ban was one of the best thing that ever happened to Canada because students who were not considering going to McGill University or Queen's University or University of Toronto because they wanted to be at America's best universities started redirecting, number one. So they started going to other places. When you do this enough, when you play this game enough, the best and the brightest in the world who do like to come to American universities start going to other places because they can stay and it's stable and it won't change. That's number one. Number two, at the height of British colonialism, and I'm very clear on the fact that it was just always bad, it was never a good thing. For all these people who argue that it took railways and gave people language, it was nonsensical. But what the British did very effectively is they would have some students come from these colonies and study in Great Britain. And the whole point was to influence the outcome that when these people came to Great Britain they would say, I wanna be more like this and I wanna do this. And I understand the rule of law and common law and things like that. Members of my family were part of that. They were all from colonized places that went to study in Britain. So the influence, the soft power you have by educating the world's students, it might actually be our single biggest export in the United States. It's the most effective thing we have. Some of these people might be Communists. It's very easy to be connected to the Communist Party in China because very similar to former Soviet nations or a lot of these Arab countries, you didn't get anywhere if you weren't a member of the party. If you wanted a job that was just anywhere above being a laborer, you needed to join the party. Nobody in senior Chinese society is not connected to the, the Communist Party. And their kids often study in America. So this is a, this is a plaything for Marco Rubio and a lot of conservatives who talk about communist China. But, but ultimately you're influencing the way a lot of these people think they might go back to China and join the government. Absolutely. That's, that's a, that's a thing that might happen. Or they might stay here or they might say, well, I studied in the West, I'm really friendly with the West. You remember from the nuclear negotiations there was an mit, one of those senior people on the Iranian team was a former MIT student who had a great relationship with Secretary Muniz. That helped. So these are, it's a strange way to think about things.
- [08:30]
Ben Rhodes
Well, yeah, actually, you know Javad Zarif, who was the Iranian Prime Minister also studied in the United States. Right. And spoke perfect English and it was easier obviously than to deal with him. Yeah. There's so much about this that is more self defeating for the United States than people think.
- [08:47]
Ali Velshi
Absolutely.
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Ben Rhodes
So just to break it into some pieces here, a lot of these foreign students, including a lot of these Chinese students, they pay full ride, they pay the full tuition at these universities and actually that ends up subsidizing a lot of Americans who are on financial aid. The overall economic impact just of foreign students in the United States, the 1 million total, of which China is more than a quarter, estimates are that they contribute almost $44 billion to the US economy each year. Which supports.
- [09:18]
Ali Velshi
Right. It's not a charity. Right. This is not a charity.
- [09:20]
Ben Rhodes
Yes. And you want to talk about trade deficits which trump higher education is a massive trade surplus for the U.S. but to your point, I mean, I just want to put a fine point on a couple of things. The technology piece of this, in part because the United States is under invested in STEM. Go into a PhD program or a lab at an American university, or go onto Google's campus or any one of these tech companies, Microsoft, you will find a United Nations.
- [09:49]
Ali Velshi
Absolutely.
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Ben Rhodes
You'll find Chinese, Indian people from around the world. If suddenly we're kicking out a bunch of the Chinese and also just kind of making this not A welcome place. I mean, why would any foreign student take the risk of trying to matriculate at a US university? Next year there's going to be a giant sucking sound of the world's best and brightest going, why take the risk?
- [10:13]
Ali Velshi
That's, that's. I gave a commencement address to the graduate engineering class at USC. Maybe this was, I don't know, eight or 10 years ago and I had worked out this great funny speech with all sorts of cultural references that I thought the kids would laugh at. The risk, of course, is I'm a little old, so. So the things I find funny, the kids might not find funny. What I didn't realize is that this is graduate engineering students at the University of Southern California. None of them got my cultural references. Cause none of them are from here. There were Arabs, there were Indians, there were Chinese societies where, by the way, being an engineer is sort of like being a lawyer in our society, right? If you want higher office in a lot of these places or you wanna do things that are more important. Engineering tends to be sort of more important than studying the law or politics. And it was amazing to see. And part of that is because in America you can make a good amount of money as an engineer. As an undergraduate, it becomes less useful to get a master's degree. And very few people get Ph degrees. People come here because they can study, because they can get really smart, because they can be exposed to America. Can you? And I find lots of examples of people who came to America, then went back and used what they learned, you know, in America, for their own country's benefit. Of course. Education is like electricity, right? It goes everywhere. Some people will use it for good and some people will use it for bad. But we are the number one place that immigrants in the world want to come to, number one. And number two, we the number one place that students want to come and study from all over the world. China's got real universities, they've got very high level education. They can figure out a way to educate all their people and keep them there. It's not bad for us that Chinese and Russians and Arabs and Iranians and all sorts of people want to study in America. Ultimately, that is our first and easiest point of connection to them. And again, many of them stay, many of them start businesses, many of them employ other people as a result of it. The actual outcome of having immigrants to the United States as students tends to be that they come here and they make an investment and they're fruitful to the American economy. So you're Right. It's self defeating on a lot of different levels. But once you start talking about this lingo about communists and Chinese and whatever they use to talk about students at universities and the universities themselves being liberal and havens for terrorism, it gets away from you. Right. You start building policy out of this nonsense. It's one thing to just say it, but it's now becoming a thing that we're acting on. And once you lose those edges, they're hard to get back. Because these other countries that compete with the United States would like these students. They want them to pay, as you said, the full ride, so that American students can get an education at a bit of a subsidy, particularly as there's more and more pressure to cut funding. But they tend to be in sciences and engineering things that we're not educating enough people in the United States.
- [13:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And you know, they, I mean, to your point about other countries, I mean, Europe has now got an initiative over like half a billion euros. Europe is open for science. Right. Everybody smells this. Best and brightest come here. As you said, like people who become prime ministers. One anecdote I want to share, Ali, is you remember I remember President Obama's Cairo speech, which has speech writer on. I was able to get some polling where you asked people around the world and we pick people across the Muslim world. What do you like about the United States? And these were people who generally didn't like American foreign policy. Let's just say that as Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and number one was education. Because even if they didn't like US foreign policy, their cousins studied there. Right. Or somebody in their family had been a student in the United States. And losing that, we're gonna lose money, but we're gonna be dumber too. Well, I wanna build on getting dumber and talk about a story about the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is trying to overhaul the President's daily briefing. And I used to sit in this every morning with President Obama, every day. He began with this, the pdb, we called it. The intel people came in, they told you what's happening around the world. Here's the things you need to know, here's some things you might be interested in, and you kind of meet and talk about it with your national security team. So it turns out that Trump barely looks at his PDB. He's reportedly looked at it only 14 times since returning to office, which is less than once a week. And so one option that Gabbard is apparently considering is to turn the PDB into a Fox News style video because as one source told NBC, your parent quote, the problem with Trump is he doesn't read. So there's a lot to say about this, including Tulsi Gabbard has fired analysts for essentially telling Trump the truth about Venezuelan gangs. But what do you think, Ali? How would a Fox News PDB look? What are the risks of this?
- [15:11]
Ali Velshi
I'll give Tulsi Gabbard credit for trying to be creative because we've heard for a long time that Donald Trump doesn't read. So as outlandish as this is, all right, if you get him to figure out something, I mean the danger of course, Ben, is twofold. One is that Trump likes loyalists around him and he has purged his administration. And I've heard this from a lot of Trump supporters who have tried to get employed in this administration who've said that they're not MAGA enough for they're conservatives, they're conservatives. They actually like Donald Trump, they voted for him. But somewhere in their past they've either been critical, it didn't seem to stop JD Vance, but for other people it stopped them. Then you go back to the Ukraine war and you go back to why did Vladimir Putin launch this war and think that it could be done in three days or a week? Cuz he had a whole bunch of people who were too scared to tell him otherwise. So that's number one, that if you wanna win, then you gotta know what's going on. There are a lot of threats in the world and I don't know what the way for Donald Trump to consume them is, whether it's a Fox News style video or it's those what used to be Google Glass or get him an Oculus or something that somehow gets the information into his brain. But it has to happen. You can disagree with everything he comes up with, but my bigger fear is that it, he may at some points be dealing with bad information. And in this very complicated high velocity world of activity, it's so frenetic out there that you can't afford to do that. He gets locked into certain things, I.e. trade deficits are bad and tariffs across the world work. And this is very dangerous. And I know we'll chat about it, but the Iran negotiations, I mean the stuff that's happening on a daily basis, the stuff that Donald Trump's saying versus what Witkoff is saying versus what the White House, it's dangerous that you're talking about highly important, specific things and you're all getting your messaging wrong. Why? Why Is it that they were going to not enrich any uranium, Then they were going to enrich 3.6 and it was 3 and now it's back to zero again. This is all in the course of like a week.
- [17:10]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
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Ali Velshi
If the President's a decider, and I agree the President is the decider, please let him decide with the right information. So I don't know what this Fox News style thing is going to be, but if it works, give it a try.
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Ben Rhodes
Yeah, well, it seems like he'll most likely just get the information he wants to hear. Right.
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Ali Velshi
That's the danger.
- [17:32]
Ben Rhodes
Right.
- [17:32]
Ali Velshi
It's that flavor of let me give it to you in a way that's gonna be palatable to you. This is not palatable stuff. Right. You've been in those rooms, Ben. It's really hard stuff. Whether you're dealing with China or North Korea or Iran or Russia or whatever, there's a million things going on in the world. Israel, Palestine or Sudan. It's really complicated stuff. And he tends to lean towards simple answers. So these Afrikaner refugees that we brought in, it's just a ruse. It's nonsensical. My Afrikaner friends in South Africa, this is not a thing. No white Afrikaners talk about genocide. It's not a thing. And yet it's become US Foreign policy, it's become US Policy on immigration.
- [18:11]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, well, if you look at history, it's how LBJ ended up escalating in Vietnam, it's how he got into rock. Right. Presidents getting told what they wanted to hear. I mean, if you to move into Ukraine here for a moment, where good information is going to be essential. Right here are the kind of people that they're promoting in the Trump administration. The new Pentagon press secretary, Kingsley Wilson is a 26 year old daughter of a right wing commentator. She previously worked for the center for Renewing America. That's the think tank started by Russ Vogt, the author of Project 2025. And in addition to a whole bunch of other problematic views that she's expressed, she's described President Zelensky as, quote, an entitled midget and told One America News in 2023, not that long ago that Zelenskyy, quote, should be arrested on sight for what he's done to the American taxpayer. While by contrast, she said Vladimir Putin has a quote, encyclopedia knowledge of the, of his people's history. Right. So these are the kinds of people that she's not going to be in the intelligence. But I mean the fact that that's kind of a normal view of the conflict in the administration should be concerning enough. I should also add on the intelligence point because it leads into the story I want to ask you about. The Ukrainians just did this massive intelligence operation. I do wonder whether they shared that with the U.S. intelligence community, because another danger, right, is if the U.S. intelligence community seemed to be, you know, biased against Ukraine or untrustworthy, we might not get a heads up on things that are very important. And so, to be specific here, on Sunday, the eve of some talks that happened in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainians launched Operation Spiderweb, which is a massive drone strike across airfields in five different regions of Russia. The Ukrainians reported that over 40 strategic bombers, that's about a third of Russia's air fleet, capable of carrying nuclear payloads, were either destroyed or damaged in the drone attack. The furthest one was almost 3,000 miles from Ukraine's border with Russia. Their attack struck at a base in the Arctic. I mean, so this was all over the place. And the audacity of this attack was due to the fact that they smuggled the drones into Russia. The Ukrainians did on trucks. Oftentimes the truckers themselves didn't even necessarily know that this had happened. And. And so they were able to launch these drones from nearby these bases. Zelensky said it took them a year and a half to plan this operation. Do you think this. Does this matter, Ali? I mean, you've covered this topic. You've been to Ukraine. How important is this psychologically, the Ukrainians? How important is it militarily to the Russians? What was your reaction when you saw this?
- [20:51]
Ali Velshi
My reaction. I was on air when I learned about this, and the producer of mine who works on this was telling me, and he was writing it up so that we could do it as breaking news. And I never asked my producers this because, you know, my team, they're very good. And I said, are we sure about this? I mean, did somebody just say Siberia? Like, how could the Ukrainians get drones into Siberia? But I guess if you can get them a mile over the border, you can get them into Siberia. The point is, trucks with drones managed to find their way into very distant places in Russia. First of all, massively important. Alexander Vindman calls it Russia's Pearl Harbor. These Tupolev planes, because of arrangements between the United States and Russia having to do with the Cold War and nuclear stuff, have to be open. They have to be kept outside. They're sort of unprotected. So if you want to protect them, you have to invest in an entire infrastructure to protect your planes, which Russia has apparently not done enough of. They don't build those planes anymore. They're sort of lumbering. They're not jets, they're propeller aircraft. Very powerful, big propeller aircraft. But they're old. They try very hard to keep them together. They're not easily replaced. That's massive. Destroying that sort of capability is unbelievable, number one. Number two, the Russians and the Ukrainians were in Turkey already for these conversations, and it changes the game, because Donald Trump has been using this expression with the Ukrainians. You don't hold the cards. You don't have the cards. And their general view is, apparently, we have some cards, apparently that you don't know about. Now, I've been to Ukraine three times since the war started, and you know the main challenge Zelensky has? Keeping everybody on board and keeping NATO on board and trying to keep America on board. He's got another challenge, and that is the Ukrainian people, who are sturdy and deliberate, but, boy, they're tired. They've been getting hit for years now. There's always a tendency in wars like this to stop, to give up. And this idea that the US Is not behind us, there will be some people who will have a tendency to say, this becomes unwinnable. So to have a psychological win of this nature is massive for Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, but it's very influential at the table in Turkey. Erdogan has said that he will hold talks, multilateral talks, if he needs to. Trump has said America might accept an invitation. Trump has turned a little bit on Russia in the recent last month or so because he feels that Vladimir Putin is overplaying his hand and doesn't know what he's doing. So I thought it was very, very important. This will be a turning point in the war. And it's not the only time. Right. The Ukrainians hit the Moskva, the Black Sea Fleet, with American intelligence help. They blew up the Kursk Bridge. They've done some very, very big things that have an influence on Russia's ability to wage war or get things around on a normal basis. So pretty influential, I would say.
- [23:48]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, I thought that. I totally agree with you on the psychological part of this. Ukrainians need something that shows that they can escalate themselves. They need a morale boost. And frankly, because all we've seen in recent weeks and months since Trump launched this totally failed effort to end the war is kind of Russian escalation. And the Russians themselves recently launched 500 drones against the Ukrainians. And so the Russians have been steadily upping the ante. And so this is Ukrainians kind of saying that we can do this too. It does kind of leave you to wonder, where are these talks that Trump has brought about in the sense that, you know, the Russians have given Trump the back of their hand. They didn't agree to a 30 day ceasefire like the Ukrainians did. Putin didn't agree to show up in Istanbul in the same way that Zelensky said he would show up in Istanbul. So what happened on Monday is the second round of these, quote, unquote peace talks. They lasted just over an hour. You know, there's some prisoner swaps, but nothing fundamental towards ending the war. If you kind of look at what Russia's proposals are. Max Seddon of the ft, who's come on this show a bunch, who's really smart about this, he wrote the other day that Russia's demands are, quote, basically, basically mount to surrender regime change and putting Ukraine back in Russia's grip. You know, so that's where the Russian position is. I mean, what do you make of this effort by Trump to end the war? Where do you see, you've covered this closely. Where do you see this going? What do you see and worry about in terms of what Trump's reaction might be to a failure of his own initiative here?
- [25:26]
Ali Velshi
Well, it goes back to your first question about intelligence and the pdb, right? You actually have to know this story. This applies to any story, right? Including Israel, Palestine. You have to actually know the story to know who's gaslighting you, to know what history says. And then sometimes you have to put history aside for a moment to say, here's the reality on the ground, right? I sometimes think about the Middle east that way and to say, whoever, lots of blame to go around, but wherever you are, we have a bad situation on the ground. We have to move forward. Donald Trump doesn't seem to have a grasp on either of those two things. He tends to want to end wars and he tends to want to make deals. But fundamentally, you have to understand how you get there. He seems to think that the war between Russia and Ukraine seemed to just exist because he wasn't there. And on day one, he would be there and he would tell everyone what they need to do and they would somehow listen to him. That would ignore history that Vladimir Putin has misrepresented since the beginning of the war. There's a lot of legitimate history between the Ukrainians and the Russians. In fact, if you were, there's an interpretation of history that would say that Ukraine's got greater claim to Russia than Russia has to Ukraine, but that none of that matters. What matters is how will you get them to break the stalemate and to actually come to the table? What will that involve? And fundamentally, you'd have to understand that. Will it involve Ukraine giving up land or ceding land or there being some sort of unresolved status to the land that the Russians have taken? The Russian proposal involves Russian control over cities that Russia has not been able to take or hold through the course of the war. It actually includes Russia taking more from Ukraine than. Than not. What's the deal that's gonna get you a ceasefire and an end to the war? It's kind of like the tariff thing. It's kind of like the lack of industrial policy. It's kind of like the lack of a manufacturing policy. There's no end goal in sight here. There's nothing you can take to the table to say, we want you to make this deal and this is what you'll get. And this is a larger problem with American foreign policy. There was always a benefit to just being America and being at the table and to be able to say, do this and we'll owe you one. We'll be good to you, we'll defend you, we'll guarantee your sovereignty, whatever the case is. We're in such a weak position now that when America says do something, there are a lot of countries who say, maybe not.
- [27:38]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, well. And like, I really do think it's important that you come back to the intelligence point, because if you don't have an understanding of this conflict, how can you end it? Correct. I mean, Trump, when he repeated the lie that Ukraine started the war, it literally just sounded like he talked to the guys who had the all in pod and told them that it's Ukraine's fault because they wanted to be in NATO or something, and just no understanding of Putin's kind of the intellectual scaffolding that Putin has put over what is essentially a war of conquest and a restoration of the Russian empire. And if you don't get that, you don't get why Ukraine would not accept those things.
- [28:14]
Ali Velshi
But if you don't get that, how do you understand it from the perspective of World War II? I mean, these are all concepts you have to understand before you can solve the problem. And Russians want something and Ukrainians want something. And I think you and I can agree we don't want to be talking in 15 or 20 years about the fact that this war continues. But you have to know what they want and you have to be able to go there with a deal. And some of the brilliance in American history in the last 50 years has been our abilities of our Secretaries of State and our negotiators to go and figure these things out. No disrespect intended. I don't know the guy, but I don't know why Steve Witkoff is in charge of as much as he is. I mean, in the first administration, I was not sure why Jared Kushner was in charge of as much as he is. But the bottom line is you actually need experts. You need diplomatic experts, you need national security experts, you need military experts, you need historians, you need anthropologists. Like war is hard and ending it is harder.
- [29:13]
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- [30:33]
Ali Velshi
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- [31:09]
Ben Rhodes
Well, look, Ukraine is not the only war that Trump has failed to end as promised. Wanted to talk about Gaza. Before I do, though, we should note, Ali, that the horrific attack in Boulder over the weekend where we saw a man attack a weekly demonstration that was focused on raising awareness of the Israeli hostages. He threw two Molotov cocktails into a 20 person crowd while shouting Free Palestine and injuring 12 people. Could have been worse. He had more Molotov cocktails?
- [31:38]
Ali Velshi
He had a lot more.
- [31:38]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, yeah. And he tried to buy a gun, but he was denied cause he wasn't a US citizen. So in this case, you know, there was one gun law that did prevent further harm. But I mean, we should just note Ali, like, this is a worrisome time, I know, for a lot of American Jews and this is something that, you know, everybody needs. Whatever you think of this conflict.
- [32:02]
Ali Velshi
No. Yeah, we can't. This is not. And I always think at any level, of whatever side of this issue you're on, always keep the victims of this thing in mind. The hostages, their families, the people who died in Israel on October 7, the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died since. Is what you're doing here advancing their cause? Is it helping in some way? And by the way, there's a big difference between nobody at any demonstration in America should be attacked for anything. And you and I have strong views about this. But, but these are. The people who want the hostages freed are like, that's not on the other side of something. Right. We want the war to end. We want people to recognize that this has become a genocide. We want Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace. We want these hostages to return to their families. Like these are not opposites. So I don't know when people get activated by these ideologies, whether they register that. I would like this end goal, but this is not getting us there. It's terrible. It's terrible. When those two Israelis were killed in Washington. This is not the end we are looking for on any level. We're going to have to understand that antisemitism is on the rise. It is very, very dangerous to be a Jew in the world today, or at least one that's recognizable to anyone as a Jew. Or participate in things that Jews might participate in. But I've always said the people who, who go and shoot up synagogues and attack Jews, they're not on your side. Doesn't matter what side you're on, they're not on your side. You do not want to be part of that ever, under any circumstances. And I'm very sorry and sad that this is. This kind of thing is taking root.
- [33:51]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, the answer to being angry about the dehumanization of Palestinians is not.
- [33:57]
Ali Velshi
Not to dehumanize other people.
- [33:58]
Ben Rhodes
Exactly. It's not to dehumanize Jews. I mean, it's just a cycle of kind of madness. Well, let's talk about what's going on in Gaza. Last week, Tom and I talked about this really kind of Potemkin plan that the US And Israel put forward for aid called the Gaza Health Foundation. Not surprisingly, this has turned out to be a total disaster. Just so people have a refresher on what this is, the Gaza Health foundation is meant to replace the UN and other very experienced international aid organizations. Instead of 400 distribution sites that the UN has across Gaza, the GHF has four hubs that are mainly concentrated in the south, which is where Israel wants to push the population of Gaza. This forces Palestinians to have to walk long distances through Israeli military lines to get aid, which is on a first come, first serve basis. This is designed. Well, I was gonna say it's designed to be disaster. Whether it was designed or not, it's been a disaster. Yes. And may. I mean, I frankly suspect it may have been designed to be a disaster. But anyway, before I ask you about this, Ali, to get a clearer picture on it, we spoke with UNRWA's UN aid agency in Gaza. We talked to Senior Emergency Officer Louise Wateridge for her perspective. Let's go to the clip of Louise.
- [35:26]
Louise Wateridge
If you're a mother with three children under five who are probably already malnourished, you're not going to get a thing. You're not going to get any food this way. Just a few days ago, I was in an UNRWA warehouse in Amman where there is enough food to feed 200,000 people. It could be in the Gaza Strip in three hours. And I'm on the phone to my colleague Muna, who's standing in our warehouse in Gaza City. It's completely empty because the last of our supplies in Gaza were distributed over five weeks ago. So her family are starving. They are mixing flour with dirt to make it last longer. It's not just the humanitarian Supplies being prevented from entering. It's the personnel themselves. So many colleagues now across the UN, across NGOs, are being denied entry, in addition to a rise in international doctors and surgeons being denied. The bombing doesn't stop. It just does not stop. My colleague Fadi, he's in the very north of Gaza. He spent the last three days debating back and forth with us whether he and his children should flee the area. And he just kept landing on the fact that no matter how bad it got, there was absolutely nowhere for them to go. He had nowhere to lead his children. So families are deciding that they would rather. Rather stay and die together than be killed or shot down in the street, fleeing.
- [36:55]
Ben Rhodes
So that's a pretty vivid picture. And again, I just want to reiterate, if they wanted to let aid get into Gaza, they could do it tomorrow. I think what she said about the warehouse, that could feed 200,000 people, this is what was dumb about the peer under Biden. Like, they can drive trucks across the border into Gaza if they wanted to.
- [37:13]
Ali Velshi
Correct. We didn't have to build a pier. We could just drive trucks in.
- [37:15]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, we don't need a pier. We don't need this Gazelle Foundation. To make matters worse, the IDF opened fire yesterday near one of these hubs, killing at least 27 people. So there's been violence obviously around the distribution of this assistance. The IDF said this. The troops carried out warning fire, and after suspects failed to retreat, additional shots were directed near a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops. Obviously, this is a chaotic situation. You couldn't design a more chaotic situation. How do you look at this Gaza Humanitarian foundation ally, and this fact that you seem to have gotten more international attention in recent weeks as the lack of any aid getting in for the last.
- [37:59]
Ali Velshi
Oh, a lot more.
- [37:59]
Ben Rhodes
A lot more registered. But where do you see this going?
- [38:03]
Ali Velshi
Well, if there were to be a silver lining around this very dark, thick storm cloud, it is that it has gotten more international attention. Countries that have been very careful to not want to ever criticize Israel or be very sparing about it have come in and said, there are very many bright lines that Israel has stepped over. The American ambassador to Israel continues to say this is all lies. The system is working much better than anybody thinks it is. Lies are not lies. You and I discussed this the other day, that one of the difficulties for Western media covering Gaza is that you're not free to cover Gaza. First of all, it's unsafe. And second of all, I mean, when we go to Ukraine to cover the war, you are in theory under the protection of the, of the Ukrainian military. When you go into Gaza to cover the war, you're under the auspices of the Israeli military, who is entitled to censor your information. So stuff gets out and we can see things. But, but we, you know, when an American ambassador tells us these are lies, we have to rely on interviews like the one you just conducted to, to get the truth. I will say there is growing condemnation of what Israel is doing because there's just a shortage of food. This is just a calorie deficit. It is a way to starve people into doing what you want them to do. David Miliband of the IRC made a very interesting point. They've been so short of food for so long in Gaza that the value of that food has gone up. And when the value of food goes up in a desperate situation or in a situation that's close to a famine, you will have looting. And so the best way to eliminate that problem, if there's actually not a shortage of food, and as the person you just ran the interview of, said the UNRWA official, there's lots of food. There's lots of food in the region, lots of food in Israel, there's lots of food in Jordan, there's lots of food. It's just not getting in the way to solve this problem. If people are running to get food and it's becoming a riotous situation, flood the zone with food and then the value of that food goes down and people don't loot it and don't. I mean, these people have nothing. I mean, I can't believe that story of mixing flour and dirt to make it go, go farther. So to the extent that the world can see this and we have to talk about it, there can be enough pressure brought to bear. By the way, as you and I have discussed many times, doesn't have to be a lot of pressure. America could bring all the pressure necessary to stop this nonsense. On one hand, Donald Trump is using some of our influence with Netanyahu to try and get his Iran deal. But that same influence can be used to say, stop this. Now. Donald Trump keeps saying sort of nebulous, non specific things like, you have to end this or I'm going to tell Netanyahu to end this or I need him to wrap it up again. It's like the Russia, Ukraine thing. What does end this and wrap it up mean? If you have some understanding of history, you'll understand why this has never ended and why it's a very difficult problem to End. And it's going to take someone more sophisticated again than Witkoff and Huckabee to solve it. This is going to have to be an all of government effort to say we're going to try and resolve this issue and we're not even putting a finger, the little pinky of government into this one.
- [41:15]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, one more thing on aid, and then I want to step back and ask you that bigger picture question that you alluded to. I mean, I cannot help but be cynical about this Israeli government. And as you said, if they wanted to feed people, they could do it tomorrow.
- [41:32]
Ali Velshi
It's an old science. This is not actually highly sophisticated. Gaza's a tiny little place. It's not that complicated.
- [41:38]
Ben Rhodes
Drives some trucks. And actually the cynic in me about their intentions is they kind of want these scenes of chaos. You tell people you have to walk forever to get to this minimal amount of aid. Of course people are starving to death. It's gonna be chaotic. To Miliband's point, this happens anywhere. And I think they kind of want to make it seem like it's hard to get aid in or something like, oh, look, we tried and these crazy scenes happen and then we had to shoot people. I mean, to step back to your point about understanding the intention here, I think we have to put this in the context of what's happening in Gaza, where literally you have ministers calling for ethnic cleansing repeatedly and the west bank, because last week Israel announced what is really an extraordinary expansion of settlements. 22 new settlements in the west bank and the largest expansion since the signing of the Oslo Accords. This is not like approving some apartment units. Right. The Defense Minister of Israel called it a, quote, strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state.
- [42:45]
Ali Velshi
Yep.
- [42:45]
Ben Rhodes
So they're saying the quiet part out loud here.
- [42:48]
Ali Velshi
Yes.
- [42:49]
Ben Rhodes
You know, Smotrich, the finance minister said, next step, sovereignty. This Israeli government wants to annex the West Bank. I mean, it's pretty clear in the same way that they want Gazans to leave Gaza. And so the question I have for you, Ali, is you covered this for a long time. People like us, earnest liberals, we talk about a two state solution. But these settlements are so far advanced in the west bank that there actually is no two state solution that is available. Unless you somehow the Israeli government went from being run by settlers to, to literally probably having to physically remove them. Where is this going? I mean, do we have to start thinking some people want a one state solution with equal rights. Some people may just want to ethnically cleanse the West Bank? And Gaza, there are people talking about the old idea of a Palestinian, Jordanian kind of confederation. Where is this going?
- [43:44]
Ali Velshi
I think more people on the ground now want a one state solution than a two state solution for different reasons. A lot of Palestinians think that their demographics will allow them to, will take the lead if they were to get, be given rights. Which is why what used to be a very outside the mainstream view that Naftali Bennett and others had about just simply annexing the entire west bank, let's not even talk about rights. It just, it's going to be, it's just going to be, we're going to govern it, you're not going to have rights and that's, that's how it's going to be. Interestingly enough, there has been new life breathed into this two state solution discussion on an international level. Right. There's going to be a conference in June in New York where the, where Macron is leading this idea and thinking maybe the UK might join in. The US has warned everybody, don't even think about it. The UK has taken the position that while they might be interested in supporting a Palestinian state, they won't make any such declaration unless it looks like it's a likelihood or it's about to happen, which is a strange ideological position to take. So on one hand it's breathed new life into this otherwise dead idea of a two state solution. On the other hand, the collapse of the center and the left in Israeli politics because they've had such a falling out with Netanyahu, Generally speaking, over October 7th and the hostages and of course the Supreme Court reworkings in Israel has meant that Netanyahu no longer even has to pretend to do things that centrists or center left people in Israel who are a very large part of the population are interested in. He just has to, he has, he needs the support of the far right. And these views that were not anywhere within the realm of mainstream Israeli politics now dominate. And Donald Trump coming in with his idea about clear it out and make condos and make a development out of it played into those hands because that kind of stuff was not talked about in mainstream Israeli politics. Israeli politics and journalism is very robust. As you know, they have good discussions about a lot of things. But this stuff was always thought of as wacky to the far right and now it's mainstream. So hearts are hardened. There's not a lot of support on the ground for a two state solution. The Israeli government is, I mean, I can't believe you and I are saying this is More right wing than it's ever been. But international support for something that looks like a two state solution is growing. You're the expert on this. I don't know how that adds up. The world may come around to the idea that we want a two state solution. The people on the ground are like, forget it, we're way past that.
- [46:09]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, the Europeans are moving to recognition, but the problem is there's nothing to recognize. Right. If they don't have any territory. I mean, a question I have for you. You know, you've been in the region over the years. The missing piece here to me is the Arab states who in a lot of ways, I think, haven't gotten enough shit for failing to stand up for the Palestinians.
- [46:32]
Ali Velshi
They talk about it a lot.
- [46:34]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, they talk about it. But I mean, the Emiratis, the people in the Abraham Accords, they haven't really put any skin in the game. But the reality that they're gonna have to contend with is this is happening. Right. And Trump listens to those guys. He's clearly willing to break with Netanyahu on Iran, where he's now, it seems like, trending towards allowing Iran to have a domestic enrichment capability in its nuclear program. But at the same time, I think Trump doesn't even understand how some of the things he does and says about this issue do play into Netanyahu's hand. So, for instance, that crazy Gaza plan, right, where we're gonna have a Riviera on the Gaza, to Trump, I weirdly think he was kind of like just trolling everybody. Right. Like, you know, he's tweeting out AI videos about Elon Musk partying in this Trump Gaza with the Trump statue. I don't even know that he's aware that he's literally endorsing the ethnic cleansing agenda of the far right.
- [47:36]
Ali Velshi
Of the far right. Yeah.
- [47:38]
Ben Rhodes
And all these Gulf Arabs who are more than happy to cozy up to Trump, they're in bed with him too. And the question I have is just because I honestly think if we reach the. By the end of the Trump term, it's quite possible that Gaza and the west bank are annexed by this Israeli government. I mean, that's.
- [47:58]
Ali Velshi
They're talking about it, they're saying it.
- [47:59]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And that there might be like some mass population transfer. That's not going to be good for Mohammed bin Salman, for his own domestic politics. That's not going to be good for any of these leaders. Certainly not for King Abdullah of Jordan. And do you see any stirring there?
- [48:18]
Ali Velshi
I do See some. So first of all, this June 17 summit in New York about recognizing Palestine as a state is sort of co sponsored by the Saudis and But yeah, you're getting Abraham Accords. I mean, I keep hearing people carry on. I don't feel allowed to swear on this podcast. But about how this was, this was a, you know, some kind of a peace deal or something. At least they don't. That that is gone now. That, that, that has been.
- [48:43]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that was always bullshit.
- [48:45]
Ali Velshi
It was always bullshit.
- [48:46]
Ben Rhodes
And I have to say, Ally, it.
- [48:47]
Ali Velshi
Was a trade deal.
- [48:48]
Ben Rhodes
Too many people in the media just repeated that.
- [48:50]
Ali Velshi
I totally agree with you. You know, people, I was at mainstream events where regular otherwise smart people were carrying on. It's like that wasn't what it was. It was a trade deal.
- [48:57]
Ben Rhodes
No war ended, no conflict ended, nothing.
- [48:59]
Ali Velshi
There's no Palestinians at the table. No, correct. It was a trade and one could argue, and probably Donald Trump would, that trade is a way to get to peace. And I personally don't disagree with that. But let's just call it what it was. These other Arab countries have been making hay. You know, they talk about, so does Iran. They talk a lot about the Palestinian cause, but they have not in recent decades done a whole lot to actually solve the plight of the Palestinian people. Population transfers are a ridiculous, racist idea. And people have to understand this, right? It is the same as saying to the Northern Irish, why don't you just go to France? Right? Those are white Catholics too. Why don't you just go there? It's a terrible, racist, horrible idea. That said Mohammed bin Salman, I think is realizing what you're just saying that they are going to. There's a moment here to say to America, you do need us and we can be helpful in the region. But something's going to have to come out of this. You were talking about King Abdullah of Jordan. I mean, I don't know what percentage of the Jordanian politicians, populations, two thirds or something is Palestinian.
- [50:02]
Ben Rhodes
It's like 60%, I think.
- [50:03]
Ali Velshi
Yeah. I mean, it's very high. And hearts have been hardening in that region for a long time. When I was last on the ground, prior to October 7th in the middle east, in the west bank, it was actually hard to find a whole lot of people who were supportive of what we used to think of as two state solutions or Oslo or things like that. People just want they find themselves on one side of this or the other. And there's a role to be played by those neighboring countries and they have not played it. And I think they're going to have to now they're gonna have to step up and say, this is what success looks like for us. They're feeling a little uncomfortable about this Iran deal and how that's going. The United States, the only thing it's got, other than stopping military assistance to Israel, is to broker some sort of deal between the Saudis and the Israelis, which seems to be largely off the table. So, you know, at some point, these, these, these, these Arab states do have a role to play, and this might be a moment for them.
- [51:08]
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- [52:37]
Ali Velshi
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- [53:12]
Ben Rhodes
One place where Trump is not brokering anything right now is China. And I wanted to talk to you about the trade war. You've been such a great financial reporter among other things over the years. And you know, one of the points I've made here is that China seems to both be playing this smarter but also has more cards than I think a lot of people recognize. So the latest on this is last Friday, Trump said that China had, quote, totally violated the trade truce that they negotiated in Geneva. Scott Bessant, the Treasury secretary and Trump ended his truth post with so much for being Mr. Nice Guy, all caps. And part of what this boils down to is that the US Has a desperate need for rare earth minerals. China has turned the spigot off knowing that the US Has a need for this. And Trump seems pissed off that not enough has happened to kind of turn that spigot back on while Chinese are sending their own message as they do, and the US Is headed towards a shortage of those critical minerals. Before we kind of get into kind of where the trade war is going more broadly, I just wanted to ask you, Ali, to describe for people why this is important. What cards does China have to play here when it comes to critical minerals, when it comes to supply chains, when it comes to components for clean energy, the way in which China's positioned their economy in recent years.
- [54:35]
Ali Velshi
So China not only has geographic control over a lot of rare earth minerals, and some of them are rare and some of them are not. But it's got to do with the fact that they're not everywhere and they're hard to get to. One of the things with China's Belt and Road initiative is that they, they, they cut deals, trade deals or transportation deals with countries that, that have these minerals as well. These minerals are in everything. We're going to see it very soon in car production. Literally. We're going to get to a point where car production in certain places going to have to stop if, if the, if these minerals don't get in, but it's in everything. It's in cell phones. They're important things and they're in the world of trade all the way back to the Silk, the actual Silk Road. One of the things you did is you traded with people who had things you don't have. And you might try to build your own industries, but the fact is you trade with people who have those things. China does have those cards, for better or for worse. We also realized we didn't make enough semiconductors in this country. So in the Biden administration, they tried to, they did the chips act, and we're trying to make more semiconductors. We're gonna have to find other sources of these rare earths, but for the moment, China has that card. China also has a longer view of this thing, and it's hurting us because while China, while we're imposing these whatever they are, 10% or whatever tariffs around the world, and that's those stupid Liberation Day tariffs, China's been going to these countries and saying, well, make a deal with you. The same speech that Donald Trump made in Riyadh to say, we're here to do business. We're not here to lecture you about your human rights and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. China's been saying that for a long time to countries. So it's hard to play the tough guy with China not understanding it. Maybe it goes back to your first point about the PDB or just reading about the world and China. China's very influential. The average American needs to think of China as something different than ally or adversary. It's both at the same time. We need their goods, we need their investment in the, in the US Dollar, and we need a fairer trading arrangement. And we've got to keep an eye on their, their military sites. But it's complicated. And if you don't want to approach this with the complexity necessary, you're going to find yourself on the losing end of the stick.
- [56:36]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that bothers me is there are these kind of China hawks in the US and even China experts in the US who will talk about the weakness in the Chinese economy. Right. Growth has been down. They had a bit of a real estate bust. They've taken a GDP hit.
- [56:53]
Ali Velshi
All of which is true.
- [56:54]
Ben Rhodes
It's all true. But what they're ignoring is the Chinese Communist Party has been kind of intentionally redesigning their economy for the last 10 years to anticipate where it's going. And so we're going to redirect our energy towards being the clean energy superpower. We're going to redirect our energy through Belt road to being the hub for rare earth minerals to certain critical supply chains. We are betting on technology and artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And they can absorb a lot of pain.
- [57:30]
Ali Velshi
They can.
- [57:31]
Ben Rhodes
They can have like a 20 year plan. Even a Trump can, whatever he thinks, only really have a four year plan. And I think people need to start thinking about the ways in which this could go wrong. Because let me just throw you another scenario. If Trump is insistent on going down this road and leading to a place where China is going to start creating shortages in this country, we can't manufacture certain things because we lack some of these rare earth minerals. Well, Trump's talked a lot about Greenland in Canada, right? All of a sudden if the spigot is off there, that's how you get big wars, right? Because this is World War II, right? The Japanese needed oil and gas for their war machine just like the Germans did. I mean in some ways and here the US would not be the good guys. What if we have to like in Trump's view, invade Greenland or try to annex Canada because we need those minerals desperately because we're losing the Chinese ones, right? They're knock on effects to these things.
- [58:29]
Ali Velshi
That's why the Greenland thing is not as crazy as people thought. People thought it was just, you know, he just came up with that stuff and, and Canada's, you know, interesting because Mark Carney, I think it's very going to be interesting to just watch him over the course of the next year. He has more influence on the global stage than a brand new, never before elected person from Canada should ever have. This guy, this guy knows people and he knows, he knows, knows the bond markets. He's rational. Canadians did something very interesting in this election. They sort of said, hey, because they were, they were toying with a populist conservative and they sort of said, you know what, you could just take the basement, the crazy and put it in a box and put it in the basement. Like we're not all that interested in that right now. We want stability. But you know, Canada's trading infrastructure is built for America, right? Our electricity pipes come to America, our oil pipes. I say our because I'm from Canada, but we trade up and down, north and south. Canada doesn't think to trade as much on the coasts because it doesn't, it has never needed to. America will buy every last drop of oil that Canada's got to sell. Canada's thinking about this differently now. They are thinking about this differently. There are a lot of internal politics that will say we shouldn't do this. We shouldn't build a pipeline to the west and send oil from the coast of British Columbia to China. They're talking about canceling the F35s and there are a lot of People in Canada say this is a stupid idea. We have no infrastructure to build an airplane and we have no alternative, real alternatives to the F35 available to us. But the idea that these things are being talked about, that Canada's thinking about not having all its excess oil go to the United States or that it's thinking about getting out of the Joint Force aircraft, these are very, very big deals. These are broad level destabilization. And when you do it to Canadians, let me just tell you, Canadians love America. Yeah, they love America. When you do this to Canadians and you end up in a war, you end up in Afghanistan, you end up in Iraq, and you're relying on people to join your coalition and send troops, this is where it starts to go sour. So this rare earth, minerals and resources, and it all comes together in this geopolitical vision that Donald Trump has. That's not gonna work out.
- [60:33]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. You know, I saw a stat that caught my eye Ali April was the first month ever that Canada exported more seaborne crude oil to China than the United States.
- [60:45]
Ali Velshi
Correct.
- [60:46]
Ben Rhodes
And. And I think Mark Carney's too smart for this to be a coincidence. They have all this lng. This is a case of countries kind of taking the stock of the volatility of Trump's tariffs and in Canada's case, the threat of Trump and just changing how they design their economies and their security relationships.
- [61:07]
Ali Velshi
And it might take a while, it might be slow, but interesting that people are even talking about it right now. That'd be long term bad for America. But as you and I know, people don't live and die and vote on this stuff. We're reshifting our alliances in a way that is unsafe.
- [61:22]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And if we look up in four years and to connect some of the dots that we talked about today, there's no foreign students coming here. The best science in the world is happening in other places. Countries have redesigned their economies to avoid the United States. We've lost the credibility to even be at the table on something like the Ukraine war. Israelis, with US Support, have annexed the west bank and Gaza, enraging the entire global South. Yes. People don't vote on this stuff. And you cut it will affect Americans very directly in their bottom line, in their security, and in the kind of country that their kids are going to go out in the workforce for. So, okay, we're going to take a quick break, but first, a couple of updates. On June 6, Lovett is teaming up with the Bulwarks, Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell for free. Andre a fundraiser at Will Pride hosted by Crooked Media and the Bulwark at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, dc. They're going to be celebrating Pride. They're going to be raising money for the Immigrant Defenders Law center, the group representing makeup artist and actor Andre Romero and others who were disappeared to El Salvador before the live show. Vote Save America will join forces with the Human Rights Campaign for a protest at the U.S. supreme Court. You don't want to miss that. To bring more attention to this important cause, get your tickets and RSVP for the protest@crooked.com events. Also for the next month, when you buy something from the Crooked Store, you'll get a promo code for a free free 30 day trial of Friends of the Pod, our subscription community. That means a full month of ad, free pods, exclusive subscriber only shows, and access to our Discord server, which I can tell you you do not want to miss all this. Completely free for a month. Head to qwikkid.com store now.
- [63:19]
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- [64:05]
Ben Rhodes
Ooh sheets.
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- [64:25]
Ali Velshi
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- [65:01]
Ben Rhodes
Unfortunately, the last topic I wanted to get to. We are not the only place in the world, as listeners of this podcast know, that is experiencing right wing nationalist populism in Europe. We've kind of covered this seesaw where there's some positive signs of people rejecting it. And this week we got some more negative signs. And so I want to ask you about two elections. The first is on Sunday in Poland. Warsaw's mayor, Rafael Trzkowski, who's the more liberal candidate? He's aligned with the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk. He narrowly lost a presidential election to a right wing nationalist named Karel Novrodsky. Now, this is close, so very close. If we've learned anything, some of these European countries are as polarized as we are. It was 50.89 to 49.11. It doesn't swing the whole government to the right. Again, you still have a liberal prime minister, but the president can essentially veto things and kind of neuter the capacity of that liberal government to pass much of its program. Nowadsky made clear that that's what he wants to do. Every intention he's given is that he's gonna kind of see Tusk as almost an adversary. This is a guy that has, let's just say, had some questionable views in the past. He's been blocked from accessing classified information from Poland's security services because some of his views. He's alleged to have participated in underground brawls with soccer hooligans and gangsters in 2009 and to have helped procure prostitutes for others while working as a hotel security guard in the early 2000s. So colorful character here, Poland. This is an important election in a couple ways. One, because it's just taking the barometer of right wing populism in Europe. Two, because Poland is right there on the border with Ukraine. Now, the right wing, we should say the kind of right wing in Poland has been supportive of Ukraine. So this is not like they're going to swing in the direction of Putin. I don't know, this election felt to me like it was a jump ball. I don't know that I want to overread it because it wasn't like a decisive result. But it's also clearly not a good result for liberals and will harden the kind of right wing nationalist.
- [67:19]
Ali Velshi
Yeah, and there is a Ukrainian. So Poland also spends, I think, the greatest proportion of its GDP on, on, on Defense. So it's sort of important in the grand scheme of NATO y things. But, but he's a bit of a Euro skeptic and he's sort of said that he won't sign off on, on NATO, on Ukraine joining NATO. Now that's a far off thing. It's more of a concept than it is a something that's imminent. But you know, there are. He does have some views that are unusual. He's also leaned into the anti Ukrainian immigration situation in Poland because obviously they've been the recipient of a lot of refugees, which is kind of interesting because. Because Poland actually has needs the labor. It's seen an exodus of people. So in there, in a lot of the minds of a lot of polls, having these Ukrainian mostly women and children in Poland may lead to the men when they're able to leave, when they're free to leave because they can't right now go to going to Poland. Poland's got a, this guy has Hungary tones, Orbanish tones to him. Right. The, the Poland for polls and that kind of stuff. The Euro skepticism's a little unusual and overdone. Poland has been a net remarkable recipient of being an EU country. But it's there. And I think there's a sort of a general frustration with the way things are going in a lot of countries that manifests in these sort of right wing, nativist, populist, anti immigrant movements. Even if everybody who votes for those people don't hold all of the views, which is what we've learned in the American election. Right. There are a lot of people who are just tired of Biden or didn't like Kamala Harris and they voted for Donald Trump. And now he says he has a mandate. It's like, you know, a mandate. And you didn't promise you were going to do any of these, a lot of these things, but you're doing them anyway. So this is what you're seeing in Poland, this idea that frustration led to this narrow win and it could have actual big implications for Ukraine and for Poland itself and for Europe.
- [69:17]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, just two other quick updates and then I want to step back and ask you a question about this. But I mean in Portugal, which we've talked about, the kind of right wing, you know, their flavor of right wing populist nationalism. Traega, that's the political party. Traega means enough in Portuguese. So kind of get the picture here. They became the main opposition party in parliament after finishing second in the snap election that was held a couple weeks ago. They kind of crept up and built their results in part cuz overseas voters supported them. Which I always think is kind of interesting. Cuz these are people that don't actually live there.
- [69:50]
Ali Velshi
Right.
- [69:50]
Ben Rhodes
What's with the enough skin in the game so they can be nationalists all they want. Right. So that bears watching. Portugal, a place that obviously had a kind of fascist dictator for a big chunk of the 20th century. And then in the Netherlands, interestingly today we saw a collapse of the government when the far right party that had done quite well in the last election, led by Geert Wilders, who's kind of been this anti immigrant, anti Muslim gadfly for a long time, pulled out of his coalition, critiquing the government's refusal to be tough enough or virulent enough about immigration curbs. So they'll have to be caretaker government until an election can be held there. Notably, actually the Netherlands is hosting the NATO summit later this month. But that'll go on kind of on autopilot anyway. But without getting into Portugal, the Netherlands, we kind of keep reading the tea leaves here. You saw some elections like Canada and Australia in which you saw this. It seemed like an anti Trump reaction where the center left did well. Now you see Poland and Portugal. The kind of resilience of this kind of right wing populism. How are you looking at that global trend? Ali, I know you follow this like I do. Yeah.
- [71:01]
Ali Velshi
I worry with the Netherlands. They've always had this. It's sort of like France, they've always had this far right anti immigrant in recent decades, anti Muslim movement. But I always thought by electing a few of them it was a release valve. Right. They were there, they were gadflys, they were in the system and they could be heard. Netherlands already had a conservative government and in fact most of the things that this guy who's left were talking about were in the existing immigration laws or proposed bills. It just wasn't enough for him. It wasn't far right enough for him. And so he's left and it's pissed off a lot of people in the Netherlands, including conservatives, who said it's a little bit like the bill's not passing in a Republican Congress. Right. Like Mike Johnson's not bills. Because there are a few people who just don't think they're enough. They're losing their sense of compromise in Europe. And that's what you're seeing. The Portuguese party, I mean this, the name enough. Right. It tells you a lot of the story. It's not about specific policies necessarily it's about this anger with government. It's about this anger with central government, which they're taking out on Brussels and the eu and it's a sense of nativism and home rule. And so it's a. I worry that we need global leadership that sort of says, guys, let's do this a different way. Let's go back to a world order that actually was working and democratic societies that were working. But for the moment, there's not one good, clear leader who can articulate that, where you can point to that country and say, this is working exactly the way it should. Macron's trying to hold this up in France, but he's having great difficulty. So I'm a little bit worried that this flavor is taking root.
- [72:44]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, one thing I noticed in Poland, for instance, that was very familiar is that, yes, Tusk leads this liberal coalition that won the election, but actually he was unable to pass a lot of his program because the far right in their parliament was essentially blocking his agenda. Then you run, you say, well, these guys didn't deliver. It reminded me of the Obama years where part of what the far right does is they grind government to a halt and then they blame you and then they blame you for center left elites, you know. Yes. And so someone's gonna have to get better at shifting the blame to where it needs to go. Well, one last question I wanted to ask you before we break here, which is, you know, look, you're four months. Four months and change into covering this Trump presidency.
- [73:31]
Ali Velshi
Feels like a year and a half.
- [73:33]
Ben Rhodes
I was gonna say like. And like, we don't get into. But msnbc too, has had their changes happening there. Yeah, I know you also care about global press freedom, something we've talked about. So what's this like for you? Both as a journalist trying to make sense of how to cover Trump, but also being a journalist today and kind of feeling, like, connected to this broader dynamic where it's not the greatest thing to be a journalist. You're getting demonized all the time, called fake news. How's life for Ali Velshi in month five of the Trump administration?
- [74:04]
Ali Velshi
Well, I will. One of the best things is, is that I get to dig into these topics and, and sort of give people an understanding of it. I trust that people are actually smart enough to make good decisions if given full information. And the enemy of full information is this administration. Right. They are. They are masters of stupid little bumper stickers that don't represent anywhere close to the reality of a story. So I take that responsibility very seriously as you do. It's the biggest danger of what Donald Trump does is he takes up all the oxygen in every room. And the net result is all sorts of important things that are going on around the world are just ignored. And yet all the things you and I have been discussing for an hour and we haven't touched some of them, like Sudan, like usaid, you know, these really do affect America and the world. There are gonna be diseases flying around the world that USAID was stopping from happening. There are children dying, despite what Marco Rubio says. There are actually children dying for lack of us spending money we didn't even know we were spending. In some cases, the chaos makes you not understand your place in the world. And the world is a tinderbox right now, literally. World War III can start in at least three or four places right now in the world. And if America can do anything, it can be to bring stability to the world. And I don't feel like we're on the case. I don't feel like this administration is watching the right things. We're renaming battleships because they're apparently too woke. We're just, we're in the wrong place on this. And as you know, bad things happen, wars, terrorist attacks, things like that happen when you, when your eye is not on the ball. This doesn't feel like our eye is on the, on the ball right now. And the ball is to some degree outside of America, that the danger right now exists for us outside of America and all the dangerous things that could happen. So I, I'm, I, I worry that it's all the stories you don't get to tell. The good news is I got a lot of hours on tv, so I do try and get into them and tell them. But, you know, there are weekends where you go by and there are big developments in Israel, Gaza. You can't. You don't talk about the big developments in Russia, Ukraine. We just don't talk about. Because we're discussing whether a bill can get passed in Congress. It's confusing in tough times, but I think of myself as a curator in these ages, like I think you do. It's like, what stories can we tell? How can we tell them? The viewer seems to. It seems to resonate with them. They seem to appreciate having these stories talked about.
- [76:28]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Well, one more thing. I would look, because there's. Obviously the MSNBC audience is probably inclined. Not all of it, but most of it is inclined to care. Right. They're watching political news.
- [76:40]
Ali Velshi
Sure.
- [76:41]
Ben Rhodes
But I am struck the Corruption stuff, and we've covered a lot of it on this podcast. And Eric Trump picking up a billion dollars in Vietnam after tariff is put on, or The Emiratis put $2 billion into Trump crypto, and then getting this announcement that essentially they can get whatever AI they want when going on the list. There's not that much outrage.
- [77:04]
Ali Velshi
Pardons for money.
- [77:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, Pardons for money. People buying dinner with Trump who are foreigners who've been. I mean, this should be a lot of outrage.
- [77:15]
Ali Velshi
Yeah, this is.
- [77:15]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Do you worry that the frog has been boiling here for a decade and it's hard to. You know.
- [77:19]
Ali Velshi
I completely do. I completely worry about that, that all of these things are so outrageous, but there's perhaps something else that you're focused on that's yet more outrageous, and you lose the totality of the whole thing. But we lost it when Donald Trump was elected. Right. We forgot what he did during COVID We forgot what he did during the first administration. We seem to have forgotten the crimes he was accused of committing. People just, you know, like, I guess you talk about the price eggs and you can draw people's attention away. And I get it. As an economic journalist, I get it. I actually think all elections are about economics, with very few exceptions, when you're actually in a war. Most elections are about how is my life going to be better off under this one or that one. And I think it becomes very hard to speak existentially about democracy, fairness, justice, liberty, equality on a national level, let alone an international level, at times like this. And so we've retreated into ourselves. And some things we think might be shocking, it's shocking on another level. And we've learned that what we thought were rules and regulations and laws are actually just, you know, the honor system. And when somebody decides not to honor it, that's what you're gonna get. So, yeah, finding that balance in how much you talk about the this is outrageous versus this is very specifically why this is bad and is gonna be bad for you. Having people sort of figure out that balance between my own self interest, my country's interest, and the global interest. It's an interesting. It's an interesting Venn diagram. And I get it that people are busy and they don't have time to think about Sudan and other things. But it's all connected right now. And we have to understand this is all about the responsibility that America has to the world and should have. And when we give it up, someone is there ready to take it. Could be China at this point, but someone else will take up the slack if we don't do it.
- [79:04]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that's for sure. Well look, Ali Velshi, Everybody should check out your show on MSNBC on Saturdays and Sundays. It is a remarkable cast of people you have on. Whenever I pop on, I'm going after an historian. It's not, you know, you really bring in thoughtful voices. People should read your book Small Acts of Courage and just follow you in general for thoughtful, informed, contextualized commentary on these things. So thanks for stepping in. It's always good to see you.
- [79:32]
Ali Velshi
My pleasure. It's good to be back with you, my friend.
- [79:35]
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Pod Save World is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. Say hi Ben.
- [79:46]
Ben Rhodes
Hi.
- [79:47]
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The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanner is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis thanks to our digital team Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles and Molly Lobel. Matt de Groat is our Head of production. If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community@cricket.com friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked media on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus find Pod Save the world on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and more. If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
- [80:37]
Ali Velshi
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